Damage wrote:Heard this morning that residents of Palm Island were just left to fend for themselves.
If true, it's uglier than all the promised-but-unbuilt cyclone shelters and flood protection put together.
Anyone know?
You heard right ..........
Plus just on the flood levy it has more to do with Labor trying to win back voters in Qld.
Yeah Gillard and Swan talk about $5.4 billion need to rebuild Qld over 3 years now that's around $1.8 billion a year which isn't that much.
Qld annual GDP is around $1400 billion (the budget’s annual revenue collections total $314 billion). the floods are to have affected .05% of that but ....... Most of the temporary loss of production will be incurred by the Bowen Basin coal miners. But, though it won’t show up directly in GDP, their revenue losses will be offset to some extent by the higher prices they’ll be getting as a consequence of the global market’s reaction to the disruption to supply. Qld Rail just had a float to improve infer-structure, any rebuilding will carry GST plus taxes on wages. A lot will have insurance cover approved.
And despite all the fuss the media have been making over higher fruit and vegetable prices, Treasury’s best guess is that this will cause a spike of just 0.25 percentage points in the consumer price index for the March quarter, with prices falling back in subsequent quarters.
So the floods do precious little to change the previous reality that, with unemployment down to 5 per cent and a mining investment boom on the way, the economy is close to its capacity constraint and will soon need to be restrained by higher interest rates.
So the only real problem is they have no banana's .....